Graciousness, Good Humour and Buoyant Spirit
At the age of ninety-five, EMMA HAWLEY’s maternal grandmother is as supportive and inspirational as ever.
My
maternal grandmother, Nana Flora, has always been a beautiful,
supportive presence in my life. As she enters her ninety-fifth year this
month, I’m left in awe and gratitude for her graciousness and good
humour. Her late husband, Franklin – Frank for short, is always spoken
of fondly. Though I never knew him, his memory lives on in the humorous
antics my family retells.
Nana always remains vibrant and poised. The way she can easily make conversation with anyone inspires me to stay as open and accepting. She always comments about her own mother and father-in-law: “You would never hear them criticise anyone.” This esteem she reflects in her own amiability.
I feel in awe of her buoyant spirit under all circumstances. Her devotion and trust in the triumph of goodness are a legacy I’m proud to inherit.
Nana grew up on a farm in rural Saskatchewan that her father built from the ground up. She rode a horse to a one-room schoolhouse, snow or shine. She lived through the depression, met my grandfather during World War II, and has seen monumental changes around her since her youth.
My mother remembers her sewing their clothes as a child. I remember her agile fingers playing Scott Joplin on her baby grand piano. Then there is the distinct, sweet smell of her house. I can picture her gentle hand movements that punctuate her thoughts.
Though
Nana never used a computer, my grandfather was an engineer at
IBM when computers took up entire rooms. He is hailed as one of the
fathers of computer-aided design. I now work as a graphic artist because
of the pioneering he did. His memory lives fondly in her heart; I can
feel why she still wears her wedding band over thirty years after his
passing. As I type, the solitaire of the engagement ring she passed down
to me flashes on my ring finger. She has set a high precedent for a
spiritual, loving, laughter-filled marriage, which we have every
intention to live up to. When I asked her yesterday if she was looking
forward to being a great grandmother, her smile lit up. My heart did
too.
The Old Man Who Walks With His Stick In The Air
MEGHANA ANAND’s maternal grandfather is still a lively and active member of the household.
Knock,
knock…
Who’s there?
Circle.
Circle who?
Full circle.
Like beginning to end?
No… back to the beginning.
Each morning, I savour the aroma and the flavour of South Indian filter coffee with my thatha. As I hear the tapping sound of his walking stick on the stairs, I hasten to brew a fresh round of coffee. “Meghana, I can smell fresh coffee! Is it ready?” Thus thatha greets me before he starts his routine for the day.
One of the earliest memories of being with my grandparents is that of riding on an old geared Bajaj scooter, sitting on my nani’s lap behind my thatha, as he drove us everywhere in the city – dropping and picking us up from school, visiting the doctor for our routine check-ups, taking us to the park in the evenings, and running household errands. Today I sometimes drop and pick up my eighty-nine year old thatha from the meditation centre every morning and evening on my Honda Activa.
A favourite pastime as a little girl was to solve word puzzles with thatha. He introduced me to the world of the alphabet: solving anagrams, searching for words in a word grid and verbal word games. I inherit my love for language and books from him.
I was brought up by my maternal grandparents from the age of three till I was ten years old in Ahmedabad. The bonding has been natural. While nani was a strick disciplinarian, I enjoyed breaking the rules with thatha. Watching our favourite cartoons, sneaking sweets and savouries behind nani’s back – oh, we had a gala time in the company of thatha! But now I also see how nani’s adherence to timings and schedules has groomed me in the finer aspects of managing my day-to-day life. The best thing I have learnt from her: never procrastinate. She would insist upon us finishing our school homework first thing after lunch, and then be free for the rest of the day. I would really despise it then, but it has helped me to develop the habit of tackling difficult things first to sail through the easy times – a philosophy that has helped me deal with life’s ups and downs.
After nani’s passing I have grown especially close to my thatha, and two years back he moved in with us. Initially we had to make a few adjustments to accommodate his routine into our family life; now it feels natural to have him around. The bond seems to have deepened. Many times I lack the patience and understanding in my interactions with him, but more often I am filled with a sense of wonder and inspiration to see him taking each day as it comes, living every moment to the fullest, and doing whatever he likes despite all the odds posed by his ripe old age. I cannot help wondering how life would treat me if at all I get to live to that age!
His daily routine includes morning and evening walks, meditation, television, solving word puzzles, reading books and the newspaper, and tinkering with his collection of antiques that he has preserved over the years. His prized possession is the wristwatch that was gifted to him by his company on the day of his retirement from service, and his face beams like a kid who has won the world whenever he shows it off!
I hesitate to visit his room, as the neatness with which he maintains it puts me to shame. He prides himself to be very independent, and does not like being called or treated as ‘old’. People in the neighbourhood know him as ‘the old man who walks with his stick in the air’!
These days, I find thatha younger than ever. His mental and physical faculties have definitely withered with time, but he seems to have grown younger in his spirits, in his heart. I have never seen him dull or brooding over anything; he is always positive. With the passing of time, thatha seems to be going back to the Source of his existence. What he means to me is something I am still in the process of discovering. His absence will always remind me of his presence. That life comes full circle is definitely not a myth!
That Bond Of Trust
TILDE MONTAGNOLI reminisces about her maternal grandmother.
I
was especially close to my mother’s mother. I think because we spent
a lot of time with her when we were young, the trust that built was
always present. She was not the classic grandmother: she was tall and
skinny and very serious about things like duck-shaped shoes when I
wanted cowboy boots. You know, she was her own person. We never spoke a
lot – we just hugged and sat together. We grew closer after my mother
died when I was thirteen, partly because I always looked like her in
build, so she gave me a feeling of coherence, of belonging to this
family, and also because we moved on together. She would always roll her
eyes because I insisted on digging up the painfully unsaid, but it was
also unsaid that she appreciated it, that she would take my hand just
then and just know. It is that bond of trust that never broke.
I learned from her to make elderflower syrup, to love wool and to buy shoes for my son with lots of space in the front: the simple life. She lived close to the ocean and we would stay on the beach for hours. Visiting her was like a different world in the end, and she would just sit next to me and hold my hand. One thing I have often thought about is that she never asked me what I was doing, she always asked, “How are you?” She never worried about what I had accomplished, but she did care about me not letting anything stand in the way of doing what I wanted. She was that mix of being quiet and a will-driven tank!
My grandmother was presence-less presence. I don’t remember her ever interfering or playing with us; she just wanted to sit wherever we were, and stay close to us. I used to think it was a little weird that she wasn’t really passionate about music or art or food or sports, like I saw in other adults. But now that I have a child myself I truly appreciate the consciousness she represents in my life. She was never busy doing other things, she was just around in an ‘empty’ way, kind of like the air between us.
Her own mother died when she was very young and her father remarried a woman with whom she never got along. When she was young she wanted to be a mason, as she was a tomboy, but her father refused and sent her to a housekeeping school. She didn’t like it at all and she often remembered how the teachers spoke to her. Later on in life, when she was married with children, she went to university and got a degree in English literature, not because she had to work but because she wanted to. She let us play with the tapes she used for her students, with a woman’s voice saying sentences in English over and over again, and she would listen to us say the words. She really loved her job.
